Medicolegal Sidebar: Informed Consent in the Information Age.

Abstract

The process of informed consent is essential to building the doctor-patient relationship, and also to shared decision-making, whereby patients and doctors actively work together to formulate treatment decisions. Traditionally, physicians had nearly exclusive knowledge and understanding of disease, its course, and available treatments and associated risks. This is changing. Every physician now is an educator; transfer of relevant information empowers patients, facilitates shared decision-making, and supports the concept of truly informed consent. Informed consent has a legal foundation as well. Under the legal doctrine of informed consent, a doctor must provide enough information to help the patient make enlightened healthcare choices. One premise of informed consent was that patients do not know enough, and that the doctor knows more; this asymmetry of information must be countered by physician disclosure of all relevant risks to the patient. The information age has had a profound impact on many industries, including healthcare. Patients now can find detailed medical information on the Internet, including forums where patients with similar conditions communicate about their diseases and even comment about their physicians. As such, the notion of informed consent, premised on the inherent imbalance of information in favor of the physician, may be changing rapidly.